Pioneer Is Working To Dispel The Myths

December 14, 1989|By Diane Hubbard Burns of The Sentinel Staff

Betty Hilliard, director of the University of Florida nurse-midwifery program, can hardly believe her eyes when she opens the mail these days. Every day there are two, maybe three letters from doctors, hospitals or health maintenance organizations that want to add a nurse-midwife to their practice. ''Ten years ago they would have ridden us out of town on a rail,'' said Hilliard, herself a nurse-midwife and a pioneer who helped bring the nurse-midwifery movement to Florida.

But today obstetricians and HMOs ''appreciate having nurse-midwives on staff to do childbirth education, normal baby assessments, family follow-up and breast-feeding instruction - things that are very important to families, but that the physician might not be quite as qualified to do as the nurse-midwife.''

Notice she did not say deliver babies. That's the rub.

Too many obstetricians still think of nurse-midwives as competition rather than complements to their practice.

Too many uneducated consumers still think nurse-midwives practice folk medicine and officiate over only home births.

Dispelling those notions has been the mission of Hilliard, 64, who plans to retire from teaching this spring. A graduate of the Yale University College of Nursing's first midwifery class in the 1950s, she came to teach at the University of Florida nursing school in 1961.

In the late '60s she began to work toward establishing a training program for nurse-midwives and finally saw the program - one of two in the state - open in 1982.

Before she could open a school for nurse-midwives, she needed established nurse-midwife programs where the student nurse-midwives could put in their clinical practice. She also needed proof that there would be jobs for them when they graduated.

Both have been hard to come by. ''It took a lot of P.R. to even bring people around to accepting the idea of having a nurse-midwife,'' she said.

In the mid-1970s, the University of Mississippi, using a grant to battle low-birth-weight babies in the South, sent out seed teams to establish nurse-midwifery programs in Southern cities. Hilliard helped to persuade hospitals in Boynton Beach, Clearwater and Jacksonville to take nurse-midwives on staff. ''Without that, I would still be struggling,'' she said.

The Jacksonville University Hospital nurse-midwifery program became the clinical base for Hilliard's training program, which has graduated more than 30 nurse-midwives.

There are now about 230 nurse-midwives practicing in hospital-based programs, birthing centers, clinics and doctors' offices throughout Florida. But there is still progress to be made, misconceptions to be dispelled, Hilliard said.

''We have to be members of the same team with doctors. We all have the same goal - good maternal health. It's just that we have different skills - we have to blend them together.''